LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3!

For many decades, NLP has suffered from low software engineering standards causing a limited degree of re-usability of code and interoperability of different modules within larger NLP systems. While this did not really hamper success in limited task areas (such as implementing a parser), it caused serious problems for the emerging field of language technology where the focus is on building complex integrated software systems, e.g., for information extraction or machine translation. This lack of integration has led to duplicated software development, work-arounds for programs written in different (versions of) programming languages, and ad-hoc tweaking of interfaces between modules developed at different sites.

In recent years, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework has been proposed as a middleware platform, which offers integration by design through common type systems and standardized communication methods for components analysing streams of unstructured information, such as natural language. The UIMA framework offers a solid processing infrastructure that allows developers to concentrate on the implementation of the actual analytics components. An increasing number of members of the NLP community thus have adopted UIMA as a platform facilitating the creation of reusable NLP components that can be assembled to address different NLP tasks depending on their order, combination and configuration.

This workshop aims at bringing together members of the NLP community that are users, developers or providers of either UIMA components or UIMA-related tools in order to explore and discuss the opportunities and challenges in using UIMA as a platform for modern, well-engineered NLP. In the context of an emerging NLP-oriented UIMA community, the challenge to create not only reusable, but also interoperable components raises particular interest. From a methodological perspective, interoperability relies largely on UIMA type systems. Technically, it includes issues related to the packaging and distribution of UIMA components. Also, tools are important, for example to assemble complex processing work flows, to manage the bodies of data that are to be analysed and to visualize, explore, and further deploy the analysis results. Finally, interoperability is also affected by legal issues, such as potentially incompatible licenses of components and tools.

The availability of ready-to-use components plays a major role in choosing UIMA over other alternatives. To accentuate this, the workshop puts a focus on UIMA-based components and tools that are freely available for research.

Call for Papers:

News: a one-hour beginners tutorial on UIMA will be held prior to the workshop at the same day.

Topics:

Participants are invited to present applications realized using UIMA, general experiences using UIMA as a platform for natural language processing, as well as technical papers on particular aspects of the UIMA framework. Alternatives to and comparisons of other frameworks with UIMA are of interest, too. More specifically, workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

-UIMA components with a special focus on genericity and type-system independence -Repositories of ready-to-use UIMA-based components - (Generic) type systems for UIMA -Distribution of UIMA components: documentation, licensing and packaging -Sophisticated tools to build and manage complex processing pipelines -Experience reports combining UIMA-based components from different sources as well as solutions to interoperability issues -Processing of very large data collections: scale-out, parallelization, and performance optimization -Analysis of results: exploration, evaluation, visualization, and statistical analysis -Developing for UIMA: simplified APIs, debugging, unit testing, and limitations of UIMA

Submissions:

We invite submissions of full papers, limited to 8 pages of text, and position papers or papers describing ongoing work as short papers, limited to 4 pages. Both kinds of papers will be orally presented. Double submissions (whether verbatim or in essence) should indicate this fact and name the workshop or conference event also addressed. Reviewing will not be anonymous but authors wishing to keep their anonymity may hide their identity on demand. All submissions must be in English and follow the Springer LNCS style [1] and should be created using LaTeX. Submissions must be sent in PDF format to uima.gscl2009googlemail.com no later than July, 6th.